Louise Weard

Louise Weard is a filmmaker with a degree in Film Semiotics. Hailing from Western Canada, she cut her teeth working as the cinematographer for FX legend Ryan Nicholson and emerged as an exciting new voice in underground horror with her breakout body-horror featurette Computer Hearts. Along with her filmmaking partner Dionne Copland, Louise established CyberCraft Video in 2016 and produced the short films Inferno and Haxx Deadroom, as well as the micro-budget queer slasher film Cuties. After film school she produced Dionne Copland's feature-length debut, the cabin-in-the-woods creature-feature Cold Wind Blowing, which was released in 2022.

She has been obsessed with deeply personal (and perverse) movies that push the envelope for as long as she can remember, which culminated in her winning a Most Fearless Performance Award in 2015 for her short film S.I.D.S. in which she played herself as a transsexual woman seeking a back alley surgery. Nearly a decade after completing her debut film, Computer Hearts, it was rediscovered as a significant work of transgender horror cinema and screened at The Music Box in Chicago, IL during their Music Box of Horrors event in October 2022.

Her film theory writing encompasses work on the on-screen semiotics of the Marquis de Sade and a comprehensive history of films featuring phallic genital trauma, the latter of which can be found in the book Divergent Terror: The Crossroads of Queerness and Horror. In September 2022, she co-hosted the 100 Best Kills event at Fantastic Fest in a night dedicated to castration scenes in film.